“The mat reveals your strengths but also exposes
your weaknesses.”
A day of reckoning always awaits, even for skilled black
belts, when that crack in one’s foundation must be paid
for, Machado said. “The black belt can do very well using
his strengths, but if he’s ever put in a place where he
has a weakness, he becomes like a blue belt. So I always
bring my students back to uncomfortable places and
refresh them on getting out of trouble.
“That’s something you should always work toward:
being comfortable with the uncomfortable.”Coming to America
Machado learned how to deal
with uncomfortable situations
early in his jiu-jitsu career. As
part of the Gracie family — albeit
with a different surname — he
felt pressure to perform at a high
level when representing the fam-
ily in competition. His younger
brothers, who followed him into
the sport, were also expected to
maintain the same high stan-
dards. The brothers became
training partners and sounding
boards for each other, coming up
with their own ideas and eventu-
ally serving as their own coaches
for one another.
In 1988 Machado first visited
the United States while traveling
with his cousin Rorion Gracie,
who’d taught BJJ in Los Angeles
for several years. Their destina-
tion was the annual Las Vegas
convention that Chuck Norris
organizes for his martial arts
association. There, the duo taught a jiu-jitsu seminar, and
Norris was immediately hooked. Carlos returned to Bra-
zil, but his brother Rigan moved to America and began
helping Rorion teach in his garage dojo and later at the
first Gracie academy.
Not long afterward, Carlos and the other brothers
joined Rigan in America. But then a dispute with Rorion
led the Machados to open their own school in South-
ern California with Norris’ backing. The school was an
instant success, largely because of the Machados’ thor-
ough teaching method.
“We have a passion for teaching jiu-jitsu, and we want
to make sure a student never leaves the mat with a ques-
tion unanswered,” Carlos said. “If I don’t have the answer,
I won’t budge till I find a way to give you a solution. I like
to break things down so jiu-jitsu is so minute in detail
that it becomes like a science. I think this makes stu-
dents motivated because they see it’s such a fascinating
art. It’s endless. You can do the same thing a thousand
different ways, and you’ll never say you know enough.”Simple Life
Although BJJ is all about details, Machado said that
the core of the art revolves around simplicity andhen I look back on the way we did things
when I was a white belt, I can say that now
we’ve improved the whole foundation of
jiu-jitsu so that my white belts are much
better than we were. Athletes today are bet-
ter in every sport, so jiu-jitsu is no different.
But there have been quite a few upgrades in the mechan-
ics and the teaching structure that make things easier
and make students sharper. Students from when I started
in the late 1960s wouldn’t last minutes with students of
the same rank today. Today, they’re more conditioned,
they cross-train in judo, they
cross-train in wrestling.
“But I will say the core ele-
ments, the fundamentals — those
have stayed the same.”
Carlos Machado, the Brazil-
ian jiu-jitsu master who spoke
those words, understands those
core elements as well as anyone.
His aunt was married to Carlos
Gracie, eldest of the brothers
who helped lay the foundation
for BJJ. Through this family con-
nection, Machado — and later
his brothers Roger, Rigan, Jean
Jacques and John — began train-
ing with the best jiu-jitsu people
of the era. Among those they
learned from were Helio Gracie,
Carlson Gracie, Rolls Gracie and
Carlos Gracie Jr.
Each instructor had his own
style and emphasis, Machado
said. For example, Helio stressed
self-defense, Carlson and Rolls
emphasized training for competi-
tion, and Carlos Jr. concentrated
on the technical aspects of the game. The basics that
Machado gleaned from each of them stay with him to
this day.
While modern BJJ incorporates many new elements
like exotic guards and intricate submissions, you can’t
forget it has a core that should never be relinquished,
Machado said. “There is a theory in jiu-jitsu that what
starts as a crack in your foundation can become a huge
hole as time goes by. What I mean is if you miss out on
a basic move when you’re a white belt, you will have a
crack in your knowledge. When you become a blue belt,
you can disguise that crack by learning more techniques
to cover it up, but the further along in rank you go, the
bigger the crack becomes.”
He went on to cite an example: “If you have a poor
escape from the mount as a white belt, that’s a crack. But
other white belts may not have the skill to make you pay
for it, so you can get away with it. When you become a
blue belt, you may try to disguise your lack of skill at
escaping from the mount by developing a better guard
to prevent being put into the mount position. But you’re
going to have more trouble the higher you go because a
more skilled training partner will be able to take advan-
tage of that crack.
38 BLACKBELTMAG.COM OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2019